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New Mexico Senate resolution would take redistricting out of lawmakers' hands

By Steve TerrellSanta Fe New Mexican

Posted:
02/24/2013 08:49:57 AM MST

While the $7.9 million redistricting debacle of 2011 is still relatively fresh on the minds of most legislators, some lawmakers are pushing to change the way New Mexico draws its legislative and congressional political boundaries.

Senate Joint Resolution 4, sponsored by Sen. Bill O'Neill, D-Albuquerque, is a proposed constitutional amendment that would take redistricting out of the hands of the Legislature and out of reach of the governor's veto pen, creating an independent five-member commission to come up with new political maps every 10 years.

"Gerrymandering is the source of much of what is wrong with our political system," O'Neill said in an interview Friday. "I've been working with the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and other concerned citizens to come up with a viable, practical solution."

The Senate Rules Committee is scheduled to hear the resolution Monday.

In the bitter 2011 special session, the state's legislative redistricting maps were passed along party lines. Gov. Susana Martinez vetoed those plans, which in effect handed over the redistricting process to the courts. This basically was a rerun of the 2001 redistricting process - except that legal fees went up dramatically.

Under O'Neill's legislation, the state commission that nominates appeals judges would create a pool of 20 candidates. From this pool, the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate would appoint 4 members.

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Those members would select a fifth member as chairman.
In an effort to keep politics out of the commission, no more than two members of the same political party would be allowed to serve.

People who have served as a state or local elected officer or employee of either, or who ran for public office within the past five years would not be allowed on the commission. Also excluded would be lobbyists, campaign officials and political consultants.

"We want five normal individuals on the commission, people who have no political agenda," O'Neill said.

He said his proposal is modeled after independent commissions in Arizona and California.

Senate Republican Leader Stuart Ingle, who has participated in the last three redistricting sessions of the Legislature, agrees with supporters of the bill that redistricting has become way too expensive, and that the main beneficiaries have been lawyers. "It's a lawyer's retirement fund," Ingle joked.

The total cost of the last redistricting - most of which eventually was decided by a judge - was close to $7.9 million, $5.7 million of which went to legal costs. Ten years before, redistricting cost the state nearly $5.5 million, $3.7 million of which was for legal costs.
But Ingle said Friday he probably would vote against the bill if it makes it to the Senate floor. He said he's skeptical that politics could be kept out of an independent commission.

"It's still the Legislature's duty to redistrict," he said. Ingle said his biggest concern in the last redistricting session was not about protecting incumbents, but about making sure rural parts of the state got proper representation. Because of population shifts, he noted, more and more legislative seats are going to urban areas, while rural areas have lost representation in the Legislature.

Sen. Peter Wirth, D-Santa Fe, said he's a co-sponsor of O'Neill's resolution. "There was an incredible amount of frustration at the end of the last redistricting," he said. He said he's not sure that SJR 4 is a perfect solution to keep politics out of the process. "But I think it's important to have this conversation now," he said.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are 12 states that give first and final authority to a body other than the legislature for legislative redistricting. The organization's website says "the track record of success by commissions is inconsistent in terms of having plans overturned by courts. Reformers often mistakenly assume that commissions will be less partisan than legislatures when conducting redistricting but that depends largely on the design of the board or commission."

Wirth pointed to problems experienced by the independent commission in California.

In December 2011, ProPublica, a nonpartisan, independent online investigative journalism site, published a report headlined, "How Democrats Fooled California's Redistricting Commission." The article shows how the Democratic Party - after spending $7 million trying to stop the constitutional amendment that took redistricting out of the California Legislature - influenced the state's newly established independent commission.

"Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party's interests," the article says. "When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party."